Starting with shirts

In the Spring of 2017, I formed a company called Win Over All which was a clothing line and I thought this was it! The company name meant to overcome and rise above the occasion, and it was to be a brand to help people with mental toughness. I printed a bunch of shirts with custom designs and I rented a shop. I didn’t know how I wanted to build it out but based on my previous business experiences, I knew I wanted something different. While building the shop out one night, my wife and I locked up and walked down the street to a local pizza place. After dinner, I said let’s take a walk down the street. So, in the darkness of the night, we walked a few blocks until we saw the bright glow of the local cinema. I’ve NEVER had a moment in my life that hit me like a ton of bricks like this one. As we walked by, I peered into the cinema and saw the lobby. Something stopped me dead in my tracks. My wife asked, “Are you ok?” After a few seconds, I replied, “That’s it! Movies, cinema, that’s it!” This is where the tagline “Life’s a Movie, Make Highlights” came from. We wanted people to live life like a movie, the only problem was that the shirts that were already printed did not work well with the movie theme, but I knew in my heart that the theme was more important.

BONUS:

I’ve always loved movies and film. Even my dog is named after a movie character! To this day, I quote movies at least 10 times a day. Actually, my all-time favorite TV show was A&E’s Movie Magic. It was a show on how special effects were created on the films people love. After watching this show as a child, my dream was to work in Hollywood as a special effects makeup artist.

The birth of Moxmoe Pictures

Using the Win Over All brand work with a cinema theme in the original shop was working to some degree, because yes, some people were getting “tricked” into thinking it was an actual cinema they were walking into, and I knew that was ok because it at least got people talking. But ultimately, I knew I had to come up with a better name to make it all work together better. I went ahead and attempted to trademark ‘Moetion Pictures’ as a play on my nickname. After many months and tons of money later, I was told that I couldn’t trademark the name because someone else had it even though the spelling was different. I was devastated, but I wasn’t giving up. After several, and I mean several, weeks of constantly trying to develop a name that was different yet fit what I was trying to build, I was ready to almost give up. Nothing was working, or if it did, it was taken. As I’m sitting in my office chair, my dog Mox walks in, excited as always, and lays down on her rug in my office. You can tell she didn’t have a care in the world and as mad and frustrated as I was, that goober made me smile. In fact, the fun we had together could always be the highlight of my day. I leaned back and asked her “Well Mox, do you have any ideas because it’s just you and I at this?” About that time, my wife called me from work to ask how things were going and I told her they weren’t going well. As a joke, I said,

“Maybe I’ll just call it Moxmoe Pictures.”

There was a pause and she said “I like that, and it will make sense once people know about the name connection. I’ll bet a lot of people will relate to the name with the connection between them and their pet.”